Overview and CQC Inspections

OverallOutstanding

Our inspector's description of this service

Last updated 30 March 2018
We carried out this inspection under Section 60 of the Health and Social Care Act 2008 as part of our regulatory functions. This inspection was planned to check whether the provider is meeting the legal requirements and regulations associated with the Health and Social Care Act 2008, to look at the overall quality of the service, and to provide a rating for the service under the Care Act 2014.

This second comprehensive inspection took place on the 17, 18, 20 January, and 2 February 2018 and was unannounced.

The inspection was undertaken by one inspector.

Prior to the inspection, the registered manager had completed a Provider Information Return [PIR]. This is a form that asks the provider to give some key information about the service, what the service does well and improvements they plan to make. The provider returned the PIR and we took this into account when we made judgements in this report.

We reviewed the information we held about the service, including statutory notifications that the provider had sent us; a statutory notification is information about important events which the provider is required to send us by law. We also contacted Healthwatch; an independent consumer champion for people who use health and social care services.

During this inspection, we visited the service and spoke with one person who was staying overnight; we also carried out observations in communal areas of people’s interactions with staff. We visited three people who used the shared lives service at the home of their carer and spoke with three shared lives carers on the telephone. We also spoke on the telephone with the relatives of four people who used the service. In total, we spoke with fourteen members of staff, including short breaks service support staff, shared lives assessors, catering staff, service co-ordinators and the registered manager.

We looked at four records relating to the personal care support of people and five staff recruitment records. We looked at other information related to the running of and the quality of the service. This included quality assurance audits, training and supervision information for staff and arrangements for managing complaints.

Inspection ratings

We rate most services according to how safe, effective, caring, responsive and well-led they are, using four levels:

Outstanding – the service is performing exceptionally well.

Good – the service is performing well and meeting our expectations.

Requires improvement – the service isn't performing as well as it should and we have told the service how it must improve.

Inadequate – the service is performing badly and we've taken enforcement action against the provider of the service.

No rating/under appeal/rating suspended – there are some services which we can’t rate, while some might be under appeal from the provider. Suspended ratings are being reviewed by us and will be published soon.

Ticks and crosses

We don't rate every type of service. For services we haven't rated we use ticks and crosses to show whether we've asked them to take further action or taken enforcement action against them.

There's no need for the service to take further action. If this service has not had a CQC inspection since it registered with us, our judgement may be based on our assessment of declarations and evidence supplied by the service.

The service must make improvements.

At least one standard in this area was not being met when we inspected the service and we have taken enforcement action.